Communicating data is important to everyday life. Many companies rely on the flow of data between businesses in commercial transactions. Likewise, consumers use communications lines to send all types of data for personal or business uses. If a communications line is down, serious consequences can take place. For example, proprietary information may be lost, commercial transactions may not occur, emergency services may be made unavailable, etc. Additionally, the cost for failure of such data communication is enormous to businesses and consumers. Early detection of a failed communications line can reduce lost resources and downtime.
For example, consider a $35,000 communications link placed between two locations (e.g. Point A and Point B) for a business that pays $35,000 per month to operate it. If the bandwidth of the communications link is exhausted, then it will have to be replaced if additional data is to be communicated. As a result, if the exhaustion date of the communications link is not detected early, then business will have no choice but to take immediate and often expensive action to help remedy the problem. This becomes extremely costly because in addition to buying a new communications link, the business may have to pay, for example, for a SONET transport for the communications link and buy an interlaying infrastructure. This can cost the business hundreds of thousands of dollars. As such, the business would likely pass on such costs to its consumers by raising the fees to transmit data from Point A to Point B.
Furthermore, data-transmission services will run comparatively slower until the communications-link issue is resolved. Typically, a replacement communications link can take anywhere from six to nine months to arrive. If a business could more accurately forecast the date of exhaustion for a communications link, then a replacement communications link could properly be ordered, installation and other time considerations could be given their due consideration, and service interruptions could be minimized.
The current state of the art could be improved by providing, among other things, a method and graphical user interface (GUI) to monitor the status of and forecast an exhaustion date of communications links.